Page 228 of Across His Line

I take in the sight of her for a moment, standing in the doorway.

“Sleep in mine,” I say. “If you want.”

She looks at me for a second, then she closes the book on her finger and stands up and turns off the lamp.

She gets in on my side. The window side. I don’t say anything about it. I lift the comforter and she slides under it and comes straight across the mattress like there was never any question, and puts her face on my shoulder.

I put my arm around her. She fits under my chin. I fix the pillow under her head without thinking about it, push it up so it isn’t crushing her ear, and she makes a small sound like thanks that doesn’t have any words in it. She takes my other hand off the comforter and plays with it. Turns it over. Puts her fingers between my fingers, one at a time, and takes them out, and does it again.

She steals the comforter. I pull it back. Not for me. I pull it back over her shoulder where it slid off.

And I think about earlier at her grandma’s house. She’ll probably go back there. She’s going to love that old woman for the rest of her life, I can see it in her eyes, and I can’t do anything about it. I guess I shouldn’t. That’s hers.

I just need her to find something on her own so that she doesn’t have to go back there. If she goes back at all, I want it to be because she wanted to. Not because she ran out of doors.

I think she’s asleep. Her breathing’s slowed down. Her fingers have stopped moving in mine.

“I read something today,” she whispers. “In your dad’s book. There was a part about how people don’t understand how anybody gets good at anything because they only ever see the thing that worked.”

I wait.

“Like a musician,” she says. “Everybody knows the one song. Nobody knows about the hundreds of songs before it that nobody wanted. Or a painter. There’s one painting in a museum, and nobody thinks about the whole barn full of paintings that never went anywhere. Or somebody who starts a company, and it’s the ninth thing they tried, and nobody ever hears about the other eight. Everybody just sees the one.” She shifts against my chest. “And your dad wrote in the margin, nobody claps for the reps.”

That sounds like him.

She’s quiet for a while. Then she lifts her head off my shoulder, and I can feel her looking at me in the dark.

“How many shots do you think you took?”

“What?”

“Before you got good,” she says simply. “How many times did you have to shoot a puck before you could put it where you wanted?”

I open my mouth to say I don’t know. Then I actually think about it.

The garage. The dent in the door from the pucks that my father never fixed. Five, six years old, out there every day after school until my mom turned on the floodlight and yelled. Two hundred a day. More, in the summer. The rink at six in the morning when I was ten. The backyard rink my father built when I was eight that took him three weekends and he swore through the whole thing. The tarp with the holes cut out of it, hanging in front of the net. Shooting at the corners until the holes got bigger than the puck.

“I don’t know,” I say. “A lot.”

“When did you decide?” she asks. “That you wanted to go pro?”

“I don’t know. Twelve. Earlier, maybe.”

“Were you already good?”

I laugh in the dark, out loud, before I can stop it.

“No,” I say. “I was fucking terrible.”

“So why’d you keep going?”

Shit. I don’t have an answer ready.

I should because this is what I want. It’s an easy question. Somebody’s always asking me why I play. Reporters at juniors. Scouts. My dad’s friends at the club. I have an answer for them. I have three or four, actually, that I rotate. Because I want to compete at the highest level. Because I’ve always had a goal. Things like that. Things that sound good.

I lie there in the dark with her head on my chest and none of those come out.

“Because I liked it,” I say.